Kimber Myers
By nature of the unnerving story it’s telling, Primetime should be pretty grim. Director Lance Oppenheim’s narrative debut focuses on To Catch a Predator, the 2000s-era reality/news hybrid that somehow feels insane to describe today while also fitting right in with whatever “content” is now. For the blissfully uninitiated who are too young to know what “a/s/l” means, the recurring segment on Dateline NBC featured producers and host Chris Hansen setting up stings to expose sexual predators as they attempted to meet IRL with the teens they’d been chatting with online (who weren’t really teens at all).
There’s, of course, the layer of horror at what the predators are attempting to do, but there’s additional ickiness that this was all packaged as entertainment. Those behind the show and at the network saw this as something that could compete with Lost on the TV schedule for ratings, rather than questioning the ethics of vigilante justice being meted out with far-reaching effects on both everyone involved in the moment and on how media and news continue to evolve now. (That question is addressed very well by another movie: last year’s documentary Predators). And yet, for all that bleakness, Primetime is a darkly hilarious satire that somehow never loses sight of all the horrors it’s depicting.
Based on Luke Dittrich’s article in Esquire, Primetime centers on the bitchy, behind-the-scenes drama of To Catch a Predator. Host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) is all ego, driven by the allure of fame and recognition from peers like Stone Phillips. He sees himself as an investigative journalist, working to rid America of its worst men (while not being that great of a guy himself). The show employs adults pretending to be teens, first in chats with Xavier (Matthew Maher), trading AIM messages online using youthful slang amidst the come-ons from creeps. This is all set-up for when the men—and it is always men—agree to meet in real life, where young-looking Del (Phoebe Bridgers) and Dan (Skyler Gisondo) pretend to be girls and boys in rented houses just long enough for Hansen to enter the scene. He lectures the predators, who are then arrested the moment they leave the home. Hansen is hungry for a hit, as is producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), and the stakes keep getting higher as they continue to reel in the predators and the ratings.
For his first narrative feature, you might not expect doc director Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven) to be so good with actors. Part of the magic is finding the right people. Oppenheim (alongside casting directors Francine Maisler and Molly Rose) makes the perfect match between actor and character all the way down the line, from top-billed Pattinson and Emmy winner Wever as the host and producer of the segment to Jerry Maguire child star Jonathan Lipnicki as a sexual predator who appears in just a single disturbing scene. In her feature acting debut, singer Phoebe Bridgers is a goddamn find as an adult playing one of the decoys. Bokeem Woodbine is predictably magnetic as a small-town sheriff in a pivotal section of the film. A media mogul makes a cameo as himself in a role, and his appearance is the movie’s only real jump scare. I have no idea how they got him to say yes to the part, but bravo.
Unsurprisingly, most of the attention will go to Pattinson for his uncanny performance as Hansen. For those who watched the show (or Predators), it’s eerie. Pattinson is arguably one of the best actors of his generation, both for his work and what he chooses to do, and Primetime is no exception. He has engineered this performance with remarkable precision; it never feels overworked or cold. Hansen always feels like a human (a particularly terrible one). It’s a role that Pattinson calibrates so carefully for both humor and tension, and it’s so fun to watch. While Wever is more known for her work on the small screen, she holds her own with Pattison, and she might even best him with an intense—and intensely funny—scene that has her practically spitting with rage.
Yet what’s more fascinating than the performances that a documentary filmmaker gets out of everyone in the cast is how the actors on the show are perhaps the only decent people involved in its making, both in front of and behind the camera. They’re the only ones who seem to give any thought to the implications of what they’re doing and are negatively impacted by the work. Almost everyone else is a monster here, not just the predators.
It’s easy to see why actors this talented wanted to work with Oppenheim, from both a thematic angle and a style one. Primetime feels like early-era Paul Thomas Anderson in its rhythms. There’s a frenetic energy on screen, but it’s never out of control. Oppenheim is making interesting choices, including shooting key scenes in a 4:3 aspect ratio, harkening back to what TV looked like in the early 2000s before cinematic television fully took over our small screens.
Primetime is a wickedly funny film. It doesn’t dive too deeply into the larger meanings or implications of what To Catch a Predator was doing, but that’s what Predators is for and doesn’t appear to have been Oppenheim’s intention. Despite ostensibly both focusing on the same show, there’s not as much overlap between the documentary and this satire. Instead, they make for a fascinating double feature that shines a light on both past and present. Just be sure to start with Predators and end with Primetime, unless you want your day ruined by the former’s more deservedly depressing look at the phenomenon.
B+
“Primetime” is in theaters this weekend.
